The German Bild newspaper wrote in a report: The corona crisis took away millions of jobs, incomes, and many facilities from millions of people in the world. In Germany alone, restrictions on the corona caused € 300 billion in economic damage.
But with the discovery of the lights vaccine at the end of the tunnel, the Corona crisis became clear. Vaccines that save lives for successful manufacturers and their investors have brought in boxes full of money, and the Corona crisis has led to the formation of at least nine new vaccine billionaires worldwide.
At the top of the list of new billionaires are Oger Shahin, president of Bion-Tech Pharmaceutical Company, and Stephen Bansell, CEO of Moderna.
According to an analysis by People’s Vaccine Alliance, the two CEOs currently have a fortune of about $ 4 billion (€ 3.28 billion).
Also, the executives of the Chinese vaccine giant CanSino and the early investors of Moderna are among the new billions that flourished in the Corona crisis. The company’s stock rose sharply after the vaccine was approved.
According to the report, the stock price of Moderna Company has increased by more than 700% since February 2020, the shares of Bion Tech Company have increased by more than 600%, and the share price of the Chinese company Kancino has increased by about 440%.
The 9 new vaccine billionaires currently have about $ 19.3 billion in assets, according to estimates released by CNN.
Human rights activists criticize the fact that this amount is enough to fully vaccinate about 780 million people in low-income countries.
“These billions of human faces are huge profits that many pharmaceutical companies make from the monopoly of these vaccines,” said Anne Marriott, health policy director at Oxfam Relief.
In recent weeks, there have been discussions about delaying the registration of vaccine patents in order to produce more vaccines in the world. These requests were made in order to support the production of vaccines to some extent from the general budget. But Germany was among the opponents of the plan.
Biotech has received around € 325 million from the German government to commit to providing low-cost vaccines to low-income countries.
More than 160 companies around the world have worked with vaccine research and development with the help of investors. Only a handful of these companies, including BionTech and Moderna, eventually succeeded in producing the fastest vaccines in human history, and most of these companies did not succeed despite their high cost.
